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A Moralist of the Midwest

On a hill near Iowa City, a white clapboard Congregational church with bright red doors stands tucked by the side of a narrow, weed-lined road stretching through fields that used to be prairie. One cloudy afternoon in August, the novelist Marilynne Robinson and her friend Maggie Conroy, a playwright and the wife of the writer Frank Conroy, peered inside the windows. Robinson, dressed in jeans and two linen shirts, one layered over the other, cupped her hand to the pane, blocking the light to illuminate what she couldn't make out within. Soon the pastor, Jerry -- a jovial fellow in sandals -- came along and unlocked the doors. Inside, the church was surprisingly small. It had no middle aisle -- it was founded by Welsh settlers in 1846, when, as Robinson pointed out, weddings were still conducted in parlors -- and its walls were covered, bizarrely, with garish wallpaper. Taking in the room, Robinson said, with great, throaty satisfaction, ''You can really feel the density of presence here.''

This sentiment is deeply Robinsonian; insofar as there is a Marilynne Robinson way of speaking, it involves an almost hallowed attention to the forgotten and to the impact of the visual on the psyche. (''It took me a while to train my eye to the landscape,'' she said of Iowa's alluvial hills. ''But I have succeeded -- almost to the point of madness.'') Robinson had never been inside the Welsh church. But in a sense, she had just spent several years deep within it: it is the model for the congregation in her long-awaited second novel, ''Gilead,'' the story of John Ames, an elderly preacher in Iowa. With the novel completed, she had been curious to see what the space actually looked like. Atmospheric, eccentric, it satisfied her fantasies.

Twenty-three years have passed since Robinson's first, and only, novel, ''Housekeeping,'' was published in 1980, when she was 37. ''Housekeeping'' won the PEN/Faulkner Award, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and quickly came to be regarded as a modern classic. Robinson told eager interlocutors that she was at work on a new novel. She took a job at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Then years went by, and the novel didn't appear. It wasn't for lack of opportunity to write: she published two works of nonfiction in the meantime. By the late 90's, most readers had disappointedly concluded that Robinson could not rediscover her fictional voice. She would be written into American literary history as another Harper Lee.

So in January, when Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, received a manuscript from Robinson, he walked into the office of the presiding grandee and founder, Roger Straus. F.S.G. has published many Nobel laureates, and the arrival of a book from a well-known writer is not an extraordinary occurrence. But Galassi leaned in and said: ''Do you know what I have in my hands? A new novel by Marilynne Robinson.''

Like ''Housekeeping,'' ''Gilead'' is a lyrical evocation of existential solitude. But it is also a provocatively sympathetic account of the abolitionist movement and of John Brown -- whose attack on Harpers Ferry helped bring about the Civil War. In Robinson's mind, American progressives have lost the ability to ''take hold'' of an issue to mobilize change the way that radical reformers once did. And so ''Gilead'' differs from ''Housekeeping'' in one crucial way: it is an explicit corrective to what Robinson calls ''cultural amnesia.'' The explicitness of this ambition makes Robinson an anomaly in a literary landscape still more given to postmodern pontification than to old-fashioned political arguments.

In a sense, Robinson is a kind of contemporary George Eliot: socially engaged, preoccupied with the environment and the moral progress of man (especially as catalyzed through art) and preoccupied with the legacy of John Calvin (a misunderstood humanist, by Robinson's lights). Robinson, who has no television and doesn't drive, offered a scathing indictment of contemporary America's materialism and frivolity in her essay collection ''The Death of Adam''; all told, the book offered an almost anachronistically stern view of the moral failings of humankind. The curious part, then, is the degree to which readers of all persuasions find Robinson's strenuous vision a welcoming -- and welcome -- one.

t 61, Robinson gives the impression of a soul housed uncomfortably in the architecture of its body. The days of her self-conscious adolescence in northern Idaho are long behind her, yet she continues to slouch to hide her height (5-foot-8); like her heroine Jane Addams -- the Chicago social reformer and founder of Hull House -- she holds her head ''very much upon one side.'' She has her own grace, however; her face is sculptural and her features pronounced. A blunt curtain of gray hair falls past her shoulders and into her eyes, so that she must frequently push it back over her right shoulder. Her eyes are blue, or hazel, or even purple, depending on her outfit; this seems fitting, since she is fond of words like ''acculturated.'' She often pauses for a long time before speaking, which can make her appear strangely unprotected, even childlike, though this is complicated by the fact that she discernibly understands the effect she has on other people.

One Saturday evening in August, shortly after the fall semester began, Robinson joined the Conroys for a drink in their home. Earlier that week, Frank Conroy announced that he would step down as the program's director next summer. In a living room lined with leather-bound histories of Nantucket and piles of first novels, conversation drifted from speculation about Conroy's successor (not Robinson, who ''wouldn't be chairman of any department that would have me as chair'') to the grammatical puzzle posed by the first line of T.S. Eliot's ''Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'' (Shouldn't it be, ''Let us go then, you and me''?) During a discussion of a finer point of grammar, Conroy barked, ''I wouldn't know any of that!'' And then he pointed his finger at Robinson. ''But you would know, my dear; you know everything!''

To spend even a few days with Robinson is to think that she knows something about everything. Earlier that afternoon, driving around Iowa City, she offered information on the following subjects: the migratory patterns of the Amish, the ancient Greek origin of a town named Solon, soybean crops, rigid class divisions among West African immigrants, the best antiquing in the area and how the movie ''Amistad'' had woefully distorted Lewis Tappan's character (''It made me so mad'').

In fact, she knows a lot about early American culture and much less when it comes to film, television and even her fellow novelists; Robinson describes herself as ''woefully underread among my contemporaries.'' When pressed to name a living American writer she admires, she offered up Annie Dillard's name.

This will come as no surprise to those who know Robinson's work. Not unlike Dillard, Robinson is a writer because of an unrelenting pressure to explain what she calls the ''great given'' of the world. That ''given'' is her religious faith -- ''It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him,'' she writes in ''The Death of Adam.'' Robinson is a teacher in an old, religious sense of the word. It's a role she plays even in the Congregational church she attends, where she was elected a deacon for six years.

Robinson has lived in Iowa since 1989, when a telegram (''The quaintest thing!'') from Conroy inviting her to teach at the Iowa Writers' Workshop arrived at her home in Northampton, Mass. Her large appetite for solitude puts her at odds with the chummier aspects of the M.F.A. community. She lives alone -- she and her husband divorced some time ago, and her two sons, James and Joseph, are now grown up -- and spends most of her time reading and writing at home, going on frequent ''jags'' through a particular subject. She also visits with James, a computer programmer who lives a few blocks away (Joseph lives in Queens), arranges flowers for her church and walks to the university on the afternoons she is teaching. (She has taught Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau and Whitman -- the Transcendentalists compose the great American tradition, by her lights.) ''Lots of people go out to dinner after workshop, but that sort of thing just drives me crazy,'' she told me. ''I have no small talk. None. Oh, oh, oh,'' she groaned at the thought of it. ''And I like these people. They are a huge part of my emotional life. But that doesn't mean I can make small talk.''

Still, she moved, recently, to a street known as ''writers' row'' -- increasing the likelihood that one of her colleagues would spy her walking her toy poodle, Otis (named after Otis Redding), while reading. The reading is a simple risk-benefit calculation: if she doesn't read, she gets bored, and Otis's walk is cut short; if she reads, both Otis and she benefit, as long as she doesn't fall or walk into a tree. So far, she hasn't fallen, she said in August -- then corrected herself. ''The one time I fell, it was actually because I was trying to figure out if my cellphone worked. It was so surprising.''

Robinson's nonfiction emerges from her curiosity about the world and from her impatience with the frivolous ignorance of those who should know better (academics, politicians and religious leaders). ''I like to answer things for myself, to make up my mind entirely on my own,'' she said. She describes her method in ''The Death of Adam'' as ''contrarian in method and spirit.'' Indeed it is. She defends the Puritans from their humorless reputation; she wants to reclaim John Calvin -- whom history has remembered as an intolerant divider of mankind into the saved and the damned -- as a humane theologist whose ''nonhierarchical metaphysics'' stressed the dignity and equality of every human conscience and who helped advance Western culture, pushing for universal education of women as well as men. She levels a sweeping attack at the contemporary faith in science. ''The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it,'' she writes in an essay on Darwinism. ''But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic.''

This critique puts her among some good company, including the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and many of her students revere her for her breadth of mind. But her method can seem highhanded, and at times she is prone to rant and to overstate her case. (''No one'' reads Karl Marx, she likes to say, and ''no one'' reads John Calvin, not even scholars.) As a result, some students find her inflexible. ''I went to the workshop primarily to work with Marilynne Robinson, and I think of her as a genius,'' Reza Aslan, the author of a soon-to-be-published study of Islam, told me by phone. ''But I have to say that I was very, very disappointed in her as a teacher. She doesn't have too much patience for those who deviate from what she has to say. She didn't appreciate experimentation in fiction at all. Which is understandable -- when you read her prose, it's so polished and clean, you could eat off it. But she is very closed off and very much living in the wrong century.''

Whether or not that's true, there's little doubt that Robinson lives somewhere beyond the red-state-blue-state divide. As such, her life is a useful example of how looking back -- making it old, in an inversion of the Pound dictum -- can help pave paths forward.

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obinson's novels understand small-town life. She was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943, a model for Fingerbone, the fictional town in ''Housekeeping.'' John, her father, worked in the timber industry. She has one brother, David, who teaches art at the University of Virginia. Her mother, Ellen, stayed home with the two children; in photos on Robinson's refrigerator, she appears inordinately poised. ''There should be a support group for the regally mothered,'' Robinson said dryly, as I commented on the photos.

After attending high school in Coeur d'Alene -- where teachers often just sent her to the library to read -- Robinson went to Pembroke College (a part of Brown) in the early 60's. At the time, there were some 900 women in attendance. Robinson just ''squirreled herself away'' (a beloved locution) and read. It was at Pembroke too that she learned to write. ''When I was a sophomore, somehow I took John Hawkes's class. I had a ferocious roommate; we were an unlikely pair'' -- she laughed at the recollection. ''She said: 'You don't have the nerve to take John Hawkes's class. You think you're a writer, but you would never dare.' On that basis alone, I decided to take the class. He was famously difficult.''

Robinson began to write ''Housekeeping'' while working on a dissertation on Shakespeare's histories for a Ph.D. at the University of Washington (''I just wanted to read more'') and living in Massachusetts while her husband taught at the state university. She began by ''collecting metaphors'' on scraps of paper. ''I wasn't terribly conscious of what I was doing.'' For several years, she wrote at night and ''played a sleepy version of myself'' with her sons by day. She had no plans to publish the manuscript. It simply seemed too different from the work she saw being reviewed. ''It had all female characters, and it was much more about thinking, a sort of meditative book, in a period when it seemed as if there was very little writing of that kind,'' she said over coffee and nut cookies on her porch. ''I keep remembering seeing pictures of men in overalls who had just written a book about dropping everything and taking off on a motorcycle. It didn't seem as if there was any particular premium placed on inwardness or reflection at that point, and that is the only kind of writing that has ever interested me.''

Despite her expectations, ''Housekeeping'' was exceptionally well received. In The New York Times, Anatole Broyard wrote, ''Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life.'' Doris Lessing said enthusiastically, ''I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly.''

''Housekeeping'' is part of a tradition of visionary American novels, like Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy. Steeped in the sonorous rhythms of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, the prose is elegiac and infused with the spaciousness of big-sky land, where it is set. Robinson describes metaphysical states as concretely as domestic interiors. ''Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. . . . One is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away,'' Ruth, the narrator, tells us.

Primarily, ''Housekeeping'' is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, two lonely girls who are raised by their aunt Sylvie, a former transient. Their mother has drowned herself in the glacial lake that borders the town and routinely floods the house; their grandfather, too, ''escaped this world'' into the lake's waters, in a spectacular train accident. The novel is organized around a series of striking visual paradigms: the two girls skating until dark on thin ice above the water shrouding their mother and grandfather and, of course, the monolithic, elemental bridge that passes over the lake, and across which Ruth must symbolically cross at the book's end.

If ''Housekeeping'' is indeed about what Robinson called ''inwardness,'' it is not the inwardness that the 70's ''Me'' decade espoused. There is no rediscovered Inner Child; there are no recovered memories. The book deals with female alienation, but it does so with almost dispassionate reticence; ''Housekeeping'' struck a quiet chord in a generation of women who had assimilated second-wave feminism and become tired of the stridency of agenda-driven literature. Certainly it would be a mistake to consider ''Housekeeping'' a woman's book, despite its title. It is a book about spiritual order and uncountenanced yearning. Its method is metaphoric, and like the best metaphorical literature -- ''Moby-Dick,'' for example -- its symbols simultaneously edify and mystify, teach and puzzle. (Robinson actually calls her book ''Moby-Jane'' for its multiple drownings; Melville's novel is one of her favorite books.)

The novel's audience built through word of mouth, and in 1987, Bill Forsyth made it into a movie starring Christine Lahti. Robinson had become a famous writer. Only she was a famous writer without a second novel to sell. Another writer might have become concerned about her artistic dry spell. But it didn't bother Robinson: the intellectual problems that absorbed her seemed to be best addressed in nonfiction. After ''Housekeeping,'' she wrote ''Mother Country,'' a controversial expose of the accumulation of nuclear waste at the Sellafield processing plant in Britain that was highly critical of the British government and of Greenpeace's inefficacy. (''Mother Country'' was ''eye-opening,'' Robinson said; she was slapped with a libel suit by Greenpeace, of all things, and because she refused to excise any passages, the book remains banned in Britain.)

Until a few years ago, Robinson was actually trying to write a different novel: a darkly comedic story of a woman ''abraded'' by her experience of the world. She worried, though, that she was stuck in an isolated female voice like the one in ''Housekeeping''; the novel didn't seem to come together. One day, she composed a piece of a poem by one of the book's ancillary characters, an elderly preacher. ''All of a sudden, this character emerged that had a voice and presence and authority that swept everything else I'd been doing away,'' she said. After this, she wrote ''Gilead'' swiftly, in two years or so. She told Conroy that it was as if she were sitting on the narrator's lap as he whispered the story to her.

At first glance, ''Gilead'' may seem eccentrically conceived: set in 1956, it weaves together an intimate family story and a century's worth of political events in the Middle West, sprawling from Kansas to Iowa and back. The narrator is John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa who, facing death, has decided to make an account of his life for his young son (the unexpected gift of a late marriage to a much younger woman). Much of the novel is a reflection -- albeit an oblique one -- on the Kansas abolitionist movement and the years leading up to the Civil War, as experienced by Ames's grandfather, a spirited abolitionist and Civil War chaplain, and Ames's father, an ardent pacifist, whose ideologies set them at loggerheads. John Brown plays only a cameo role: the young Ames helps shelter him on the way home from a murderous raid. But the questionable merits of violent social activism cast a long shadow over the book.

What Robinson hopes to elucidate, by setting ''Gilead'' in 1956 -- on the eve of the civil rights movement -- is the swiftness with which the grand social aims of the Civil War and of the abolitionists collapsed into Jim Crow, and how easily old prejudices overcome the energy of good will. ''I became interested in the problem of how it is that people have in the past done the right thing,'' she told me over a pork-roast dinner at her house. ''Of course, I was looking at it from my own particular point of view, which is basically that of my own religious culture. The people that came to mind were the abolitionists. I wanted to know how what they thought allowed them to acquire leverage to do what needed to be done. And so slavery became the focus of the book.''

Robinson's willingness to reconsider the legacy of John Brown may invite skepticism from some fronts. After all, while Brown unflinchingly denounced slavery and helped foment the Civil War, he also murdered several supporters of slavery in the name of divine justice. Robinson, however, isn't alone in feeling that Brown has been demonized in the popular imagination; interestingly enough, Russell Banks and Bruce Olds have recently written novels that are paeans of sorts to Brown. In the end, what's best about ''Gilead'' is the way Robinson's novel -- unlike some of her more polemical essays -- invitingly challenges its readers to entertain contradictory notions at once, and appealingly dramatizes the act of puzzling over charged questions, ''trying to say what was true.'' Repeatedly, while Ames writes to his son, he revises an opinion held earlier in the lengthy ''letter'' he is composing. You can imagine Robinson doing the same, year after year, as she struggled to write a novel she could stand behind.

n Sunday morning, at Robinson's church, the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City, the Rev. Bruce Fischer asked the congregation to offer an answer to the question How do we live responsible lives? After a brief, awkward silence, hands were raised, and Fischer walked, one by one, to those who wanted to speak, and offered them the microphone. There was an assortment of rambling answers, some personal, some prescriptive, mostly earnest -- ''We need to change the kinds of books and movies people read and watch.'' Then, from the front of the church, after the pastor had repeated the question, came a deep voice that resounded through the room: ''Listen to your conscience.'' A murmur went through the congregation -- not unlike the sound made by an audience after a poet reads a reflective poem. It's this kind of exchange that brought Robinson to Congregationalism. (She attended a Presbyterian church as a child.) ''I have found my way to the right kind of institution -- that's no accident. There really is no higher priority given to anything than to freedom of individual conscience in the Congregationalist tradition, which squares very nicely with my theology.''

Exploring the demands of conscience is the heart of Robinson's work. Writing is not just an artistic calling but also a religious one: ''As a child, I couldn't see any bridge between where I was in my mind and the world around me. And I like people. I want to interact with them in meaningful ways. I do feel as though I am a highly specialized creature, and other people sort of amaze me with the fluency'' -- she paused to laugh, darkly, at her own predicament -- ''with which they do the waltz. If I couldn't write, I don't know what would happen, because that is the bridge, you know.''

What is remarkable about her fiction is that it has combined the privacy of religious reflection with a connective, complicated vision of human idealism. You might think that Robinson's dedication to moral and social change would make her feel some regret over the slowness with which her gift has manifested itself. But Robinson declared, when I asked, that she had never felt much anxiety about not writing another novel (''I'm not a worrier''). Still, the practice of writing books was much on her mind in the summer. During an afternoon stroll through a forgotten prairie graveyard, Robinson offered what could be a summary of her aesthetic: ''It's so poignant. Some of these graves look so frantically attended to, and some are completely forgotten. And I must say the forgotten ones look more attractive to my eye.'' Later, she grew more reflective and added: ''You devote your life to books, and then in a way they sort of become what they will be. And you're lucky when they do that. But then it seems as if you're looking back on a course of life that's very arbitrary, governed by the fact that you have made a certain specific number of things that have a specific character, and that's your life. It's a strange thing.''